The Story of the Mandate

The year is 1934, late fall, and Richard Catling slouches pensively against the train’s window on his way from London to Bungay where he went to school and where his father farms a few acres of mud furrowed fields in a vain attempt to keep the family’s home as the depression spreads ever more deeply in the rural countryside. (bio and obituary) Rain and sleet strike against the window creating a cacophony of clashing sounds with the clack, clack of the iron wheels below and the screeching wind that enters through the rocking clatter of the door at the end of the car.

Catling takes this train frequently to escape the dull routine of his “nothing” job at a mill, “that gave me no pleasure” yet ever dreaming “to see some other life and lives” (from tapes). Caught up in the train's indifferent rhythm he rummages through nonsensical thoughts captivated by the nothingness of his own name. “What’s a Catling?,” he muses. It tells nothing, it’s not a Brown or a Badger or a Cook, nothing identifiable; it’s not musical like some Irish names, O’Hara, Mulligan, or Nuallen, or Irish places like Limerick or Donegal or Connemara that at least connect you to someplace; Catling seems a mistake, a name that lost proper letters like Gatling or Matling, anything substantive, complete, but not Catling.

From Depression to Expectation

As Catling made his way back to the train, the evening dusk and the swirls of steam clouded the light signals creating ghost-like forms that rose and fell beneath the depot's overhang. Two long blasts signaled the train’s parting. He hurried to grab the vertical bar and swung into the doorway. How strange this interruption of his journey seemed.

Now back in his seat, he thought over these past few minutes, as the steam clouds billowed when they erupted beneath his window and the brakes screeched on the rain soaked rails, nothing but bursts of white swirling forms covering the windows until the sudden jerk arrested the forward motion of the car. Then, unexpectedly, he could see Paul Parker, his classmate from Bungay Grammar, visible in the station’s light. What happenstance is this, he thought. Where is he going? Why?

He realized that this encounter changed how he felt: no longer empty, even depressed, but rather hopeful, expectant, changed. Such a brief encounter yet one that suggested possibilities of a job, stability, even a career. His return to Bungay became suddenly a beginning where the relics of this old Saxon town with its Roman well, Norman Castle and the haunting Benedictine Priory gave promise of links to the past and the plaque of Thomas Paine in Beehive Yard promise, perhaps, even here in Britain, for the individual’s future. This late spring offered hope for the coming new year. Now as he nestled into the swaying seat with the rain still pummeling the window, he planned out his return to London and the Milbank Offices of the Mandate Police.

Richard’s chance encounter with Parker changed his life’s direction from a boy caught in the flotsam of economic chaos to one guided by a nation’s beliefs and traditions, one honed by order and regulations, and one where devotion would be rewarded. Perhaps Bungay's motto was bred into his soul: “Let us ever hold fast to the old virtues.”

When he returned to London after the weekend in Bungay where the unending rain saturated the landscape beneath an overcast sky casting a gray shroud over the land, he sought out the Mandate Police offices with the intent of understanding what the nature of the work would be. He could turn to no acquaintances, no family members or ministers of the church to offer guidance or even information on the Mandate Police or Palestine. No one he knew had any connections with either Palestine or the Police.